Multiscreen becomes mainstream for video service providers

Multiscreen becomes mainstream for video service providers
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 21 November 2014
Multiscreen TV has long been seen as table stakes for video service providers and now research from Infonetics shows that it is mainstream among this community.

inon2Indeed the analyst's 2014 Multiscreen TV Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider survey shows that 58% of respondent service providers currently support in the home all three primary multiscreen devices; that is tablets, PCs/laptops and mobile phones.

In addition the research found that nearly half of operators surveyed currently offer live streaming and respondents in the survey ranked Ericsson and Harmonic as the most familiar multiscreen vendors.

The data also revealed that transcoding is becoming more distributed with only 16% of respondents planning to transcode video content in their head-end in 2015. Interestingly other key areas were emerging in the multiscreen market, most notably network functions virtualisation (NFV).

"Service providers want flexibility in the processing platforms they use to encode and playout video content. NFV moves functions usually embedded in network hardware - such as encoders and video on demand (VOD) playout servers - into software that can run in a virtual machine on standard servers, giving operators more flexibility in how they process and distribute video content," noted Infonetics principal analyst for broadband access and pay-TV Jeff Heynen. "Though none of the service providers we interviewed for our latest multiscreen study support virtualised multiscreen video infrastructure in an NFV environment today, this grows to 42% by 2016."